Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mankind has not been very smart and does not have a very good record when it comes to managing some wildlife species. We have a long list of grave mistakes, Mr. Speaker: the bison of the plains, the passenger pigeon, the codfish off Newfoundland and now we are looking at some management plans for one of the great resources here in the North and those are the herds of caribou.

Mr. Speaker, it's kind of early days yet, but the Minister, in releasing the plan yesterday, made it very clear that this is a rolling agenda and something that is open to input. I would like to offer a bit of comment from what I have heard so far, Mr. Speaker.

The overall decision to take a precautionary stance at this time and take some measures to reduce the harvest, I think, is a good one and is generally accepted among just about all sectors of the NWT. There are a couple of variances though, Mr. Speaker, and some gaps in our overall strategy and in the way we are gathering and collecting information. One of them, for instance, seems to be considerable variance, Mr. Speaker, on the impact of predators on our herds. We have numbers listed in the government's plan, for instance, that wolves may take as few as 20, while some traditional hunters are suggesting that a wolf may take as many as 50. I think we need some work done on that one.

I think also, Mr. Speaker, as some sectors have called for quite consistently, we need to look very carefully at how we monitor and assess the health and size of our herds. It's becoming more and more apparent, for instance, Mr. Speaker, that herds change, they shift and merge and split from each other and I don't know that there is a lot of confidence in this approach to really knowing what the status is. Mr. Speaker, the position to keep an open mind and get back together again in the near future to look at this strategy again is the right one. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.